Chancellor Philip Hammond plans to make the better-off pay the lion's share of tax rises to fund the £20bn needed to save the NHS

The PM warned on Monday that everyone in Britain will have to bear some of the pain to save the overburdened health service from a future collapse.

But the duo have privately conceded that its major budget uplift could easily end in millions of lost votes for the Tories if Labour is able to claim it is being done on the backs of Britain’s struggling.

At the same time, stinging the rich again risks sparking an angry backlash among some backbench Tory MPs, who will see it as an attack on aspiration.

One Treasury figure said: “Of course we have to hit the well off the hardest, Jeremy Corbyn would have a field day with us if we didn’t.

The Chancellor has struck an agreement with Theresa May to protect poorer workers as much as possible from the levy

The Chancellor wants to raise the £20bn sum from £10bn in tax rises, with the rest coming from extra borrowing.

George Osborne’s former plan to slash the 40% rate of tax relief on higher earners’ pensions contributions - which he was forced to abandon in 2016 because of Tory fury - is to be looked at afresh.

Scrapping the 40% rate altogether could raise as much as £10bn alone.

And raising the upper earnings limit on National Insurance Contributions will also be considered, Treasury sources also said.

PM Theresa May says the increase in tax payers contribution to the NHS will be calculated in 'a fair and balanced way'

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Under it, NICs on earnings above £892 per week are capped at just 2, while most salaried employees pay 12% on weekly wages below it.

Abolishing the upper earnings limit altogether would raise £11bn.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies’ Carl Emmerson said: “It is economically possible to raise the sort of money that the Government needs entirely from higher rate taxpayers, but it would not be politically pain free.

“There are 4.28 million higher-rate taxpayers, so if you are trying to raise £10bn from this group alone then would each need to pay an extra £2,150 per year.”

Mr Hammond has insisted that no new tax rise is off the table yet, with the final blueprint to be revealed in the Budget in November.